Why Today’s Teens Are Reading Less—and What Parents Can Actually Do About It
The essays came back on a Tuesday. I’d asked my tenth graders to write a response to a short story we’d read in class, nothing fancy—just a few paragraphs explaining what they thought the main character was really afraid of. As I flipped through the stack that evening, I noticed something that had been creeping up on me for years. It wasn’t that the ideas were missing. Some of them were genuinely thoughtful. It was the sentences. Short. Fragmented. Strings of simple clauses connected by “and” or “so.” Words like “sad” and “happy” doing heavy lifting because more precise vocabulary never showed up.
I remember sitting there, cup of tea going cold, trying to pinpoint when the shift happened. And then I saw the news about the OECD report. You know the one—the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science across dozens of countries. The latest results showed the biggest drop in reading performance since the tests began. That’s not just a statistic. It’s a whole generation of kids who, on average, are less able to parse a dense text, follow an argument, or infer meaning from tone and context.
It would be easy to panic. But I’ve been in classrooms for over fifteen years, and I’ve learned that panic doesn’t help anyone. What helps is noticing what’s actually going on.
The next day, I had a conversation with a student named Marcus. He’s a bright kid, quick with a joke, and he’d scored okay on the essay—not great, but okay. I asked him how much he read outside of school. He shrugged. “I read stuff online. Like, social media. And sometimes gaming forums.”
“Do you ever read anything longer?” I asked.
“I started a book last summer,” he said. “My mom made me. But I couldn’t get into it. Too many descriptions. And the words were weird.”
I didn’t argue with him. He wasn’t being lazy. He was being honest. The kind of reading he does every day—short posts, memes, quick video captions—doesn’t train the brain to sit with a long, complex text. It trains it to skim, to jump, to grab the gist and move on. This isn’t a moral failing. It’s a habit, and habits can be changed. But only if we understand how they formed in the first place.
Here’s the thing about the OECD report that most articles don’t tell you: reading scores have been declining for a while, but the pandemic didn’t help. Remote learning, screen fatigue, and the sheer stress of those years pulled kids away from the kind of deep, quiet attention that reading requires. But even before that, smartphones and infinite feeds were winning the battle for our kids’ attention. You can’t compete with a perfectly engineered algorithm that serves up a new snippet of dopamine every few seconds. A novel doesn’t stand a chance if it takes ten minutes to get interesting.
So what do we do? We don’t shame our kids. We don’t lecture them about “the good old days.” That just makes them shut down. Instead, we adjust the environment and our expectations.
One thing that works in my classroom is reading out loud. Not in a babyish way, but as a shared activity. We read the first few pages of a story together, and I stop to model what’s going through my head as I read. I say things like, “Hold on, why would the author describe the kitchen as ‘claustrophobic’? What does that tell us about how the character feels?” It sounds simple, but kids have never seen an adult think through a text before. They think reading is just decoding words, not an active conversation with the page. When I do this, the essays get better almost immediately.
At home, parents can do a version of this. It doesn’t require forced “family reading time” or banning phones. It just means being visible as a reader. Let your teen see you reading something real—a book, a long article, even a manual. Talk about it at dinner. Say, “I read something today that made me angry about the school board budget” or “This chapter made me realize why my dad was so strict.” That shows reading as a living, useful thing, not a school requirement.
Another concrete move: don’t insist on classic literature. Let them read what they want. Graphic novels, sports biographies, fan fiction, YouTube video essays typed out for a class—it all counts. The skill of reading is transferable. If your teen devours a 200-page manga in one sitting, that’s stamina. That’s comprehension. We can build from there.
One parent I know started a “book swap” with her son. He reads a chapter of her pick, she reads a chapter of his. It’s not elegant. The books are often terrible. But they talk about them, and that conversation is where the literacy actually happens. She’s not trying to make him love Camus. She’s trying to keep his brain in the habit of following a narrative across multiple pages. The vocabulary and deeper analysis can come later.
What about screens? Most families can’t just eliminate them. But we can be more intentional. The OECD report doesn’t say “all screen time is bad.” It says that purely consuming short, fragmented content doesn’t build the same neural pathways as reading long-form text. So instead of trying to pry the phone out of your kid’s hand, try shifting the type of content. Long-form articles on topics they care about—sports, fashion, gaming, climate change—are a bridge. My own son, who hated novels, once spent an hour reading a 4,000-word feature about how a professional skateboarder trained for a competition. He didn’t call it reading. He called it “research.” Fine. I’ll take it.
I also think we need to lower the pressure around reading. When I meet with parents, they often say, “He used to love reading in elementary school. Now he won’t pick up a book.” And I get it. It’s sad. But the worst thing we can do is turn reading into a battleground. If every interaction around books involves nagging or disappointment, reading becomes the enemy. So we let go of the idea that literacy looks a certain way. It might look like a kid listening to an audiobook while playing a mindless video game. That’s still processing narrative. It might look like a teen who reads the same three page subreddit threads every night. That’s still following written arguments.
The OECD report is sobering, but it’s not a verdict. It’s a snapshot of a moment in time. What matters isn’t the score on a test. It’s whether we, as the adults around them, can stay curious about what our kids are actually doing with their attention and then nudge—not shove—them toward longer, deeper texts.
I still don’t know if Marcus will ever finish a novel for fun. But I saw him a week after our conversation with a tattered copy of a science fiction book, one I’d recommended to him reluctantly, because I wasn’t sure he’d take to it. He told me he was two chapters in and “it wasn’t bad.” That’s not a triumph. It’s a start. And right now, that’s enough.
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